Search Results for medicare pay cuts doctors

Novartis Fights India for Cancer Pill Patent (WSJ): In India’s Supreme Court on Wednesday, Novartis will be seeking patent protection for its blockbuster cancer drug Glivec in a case that could deliver far-reaching ramifications for multinational pharmaceutical companies operating in India. The drug is sold as Gleevec in the U.S.

Aetna to Acquire Coventry Health(WSJ): The $5.7 billion deal makes Aetna, known more for commercial health insurance, one of the largest providers of government-financed health care, building its business in privately managed Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Under the negotiations that created the supercommittee, its failure to reach an agreement means automatic budget cuts worth $1.2 trillion, including a 2% reduction every year from 2013 to 2021 in the payments received by health-care providers for treating Medicare beneficiaries …

At first blush, Washington’s tough talk about fiscal austerity doesn’t look good for drug makers. Government programs including Medicare and Medicaid spend $99 billion each year on prescription medicines, according to Washington consulting firm Avalere Health, making for a ripe cost-cutting target.

Not surprisingly, drug stocks have dropped with the rest of the market recently. As the WSJ reports, pharma companies have ramped up their lobbying, warning that cuts to the drug prices paid by Medicare’s drug benefit, for example, could mean loss of some of the industry’s 675,000 jobs and investment in new lifesaving treatments …

The House yesterday passed a one-year fix for the cuts in Medicare reimbursement that would have kicked in Jan. 1. The Senate approved the bill earlier in the week, and since President Obama pushed for the bill, we can assume it will soon be law.

As far as holiday gifts go, this isn’t exactly the equivalent of a pony. A one-year patch certainly gives everyone some breathing room, but as we’ve written, every time the problem is pushed off, the problem gets bigger. So a year from now, physicians will be facing even steeper cuts.

The president of the American Medical Association, Cecil Wilson, said in a statement yesterday that the group “welcomes” the legislation …

Those six months are almost up, and now there’s a 23% reimbursement cut due to kick in Dec. 1 and a 25% cut on Jan. 1, according to the American Medical Association. Once again, the AMA is warning of the effects if Congress doesn’t come up with a longer-term solution.

If Congress doesn’t come up with a fix before it adjourns for the Thanksgiving holiday, it will be “catastrophic for seniors who rely on the Medicare program,” AMA President Cecil Wilson said at a press conference in San Diego, where the physicians’ group is holding a meeting. The …

Next spring, hospitals and medical practices that have adopted electronic medical records and demonstrated so-called “meaningful use” will start getting their incentive checks from the government. And, says Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman, that will likely kick off a new round of orders from providers who were previously on the sidelines …

Roche Gets Ready: Swiss drug maker Roche’s strategy for dealing with future generic competition for its biotech drugs consists of developing improved versions of its current treatments, coming up with new ones and lobbying regulators to set high standards for follow-on biologics and biosimilars, the WSJ reports. For example, the company is working on new iterations of Herceptin and MabThera, which come off patent in Europe in 2014 and 2015 respectively …

Court Action: The Justice Department is getting involved in a whistleblower suit against Pfizer’s Wyeth unit that includes allegations of off-label promotion and kickbacks, the WSJ reports. Two former Wyeth sales reps filed the suit in 2005 over the company’s handling of Rapamune, approved to combat rejection of donated kidneys but which the reps say was also promoted for lung transplants and other unapproved uses. In a court filing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania asked to take over the case …

Frozen Out?: Medtronic’s new Arctic Front device, which treats atrial fibrillation by freezing small patches of the heart, can also damage the nearby phrenic nerve, making the device’s FDA approval uncertain, the WSJ reports. Physicians quoted by the paper are divided on whether the side effect — which occurred in 13% of patients …

When we last checked in on the looming 21% Medicare payment cuts for doctors, the AMA had unveiled a multi-million dollar ad campaign chiding senators for heading out of town over Memorial Day rather than staying behind to fix the payment formula for good. And not even a Band Aid has been applied to the problem since — yesterday the Senate effectively rejected a spending bill that included a 19-month fix for Medicare payments.

The WSJ reports that a vote on a scaled-back bill with shorter-term relief for doctors might be up for a final vote by the end of the week. The Associated Press says that the latest version of the bill would include only a six-month fix. Politico reports the fix could be six or …

New CML Contenders: Among the spate of weekend news coming out of the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting: data show that drugs by Bristol Myers-Squibb and Novartis may top the performance of Gleevec, the Novartis superdrug now used against chronic myeloid leukemia. As the WSJ reports, separate studies showed that Bristol’s Sprycel and Novartis’s Tasigna improved …

The gist of the American Medical Association’s new “multi-million dollar” ad campaign: Senators blew out of town for a Memorial Day vacation rather than staying to deal with the looming cuts in Medicare reimbursement to doctors. (Here’s the AMA’s print ad.)

The AMA wants the public to contact senators and tell them to “get back to work and fix Medicare now.” As we wrote yesterday, a 21% cut in reimbursement rates to doctors officially took effect June 1, but …

“Congress has already missed the deadline for new legislation to block cuts of 21% in Medicare payments to doctors. The pay reduction officially took effect June 1, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the federal agency that oversees the giant health systems — put a hold on processing physician payments for 10 business days, effectively pushing off the bite on payments for physicians’ services until June 15.”

If that paragraph sounds familiar, it’s because only the dates have changed — otherwise it’s exactly the same thing we wrote back in April, when we last faced this situation. The American Medical Association, for one, is increasingly peeved with the blown deadlines and on Thursday will lay out the details of a “multi-million dollar” ad campaign …

Lack of Interest for Avandia Trial: Two institutions that were to be sites for the safety trial of GlaxoSmithKline’s much-discussed diabetes drug Avandia have pulled out of the study due to lack of patient interest, the WSJ reports. The company has been adding sites in developing nations, which concerns Public Citizen’s Sidney Wolfe because of the potential for lack of informed consent …

Controversy over Planned Parenthood has drawn new attention to the use of fetal tissue for medical research, a decades-old practice that remains common in some fields even as alternatives are explored.